Birgit Hellwig

Last updated

Birgit Hellwig is a German linguist specializing in African and Papuan languages. She is professor of general linguistics at the University of Cologne. [1]

Contents

Education, career and honours

Hellwig studied African linguistics at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Hamburg. [2] In 1998 she took up a doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, where her doctorate was awarded in 2001. [1] [2] She remained in Nijmegen working at the Language Archive until 2003. Between 2003 and 2005 she carried out postdoctoral research at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and from 2006 to 2008 at La Trobe University in Melbourne; during this time she collaborated with the Department of Linguistics at the University of Khartoum. [1]

In 2008, Hellwig took up a junior professorship in language documentation at the University of Erfurt. In 2010 she returned to La Trobe University, this time as a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Language Diversity. Since 2014 she has been professor for language documentation and psycholinguistics at the University of Cologne. [1]

In 2020, Hellwig was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea. [1]

Research

Hellwig conducts research into language documentation, language acquisition, linguistic typology, and anthropological linguistics. [1] She has worked on a variety of languages of Africa, including Goemai and other Chadic languages, Katla, Tabaq, and Zaghawa, as well as the Qaqet language of Papua New Guinea. [3] A major focus of her research has been creating corpora for all of the above languages, based on original fieldwork. [3] Her research has received funding from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, [4] the Australian Research Council, [5] , the German Research Foundation, [6] and the Volkswagen Foundation. [7]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions. English and other languages present number categories of singular or plural, both of which are cited by using the hash sign (#) or by the numero signs "No." and "Nos." respectively. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.

Goemai is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in the Great Muri Plains region of Plateau State in central Nigeria, between the Jos Plateau and Benue River. Goemai is also the name of the ethnic group of speakers of the Goemai language. The name 'Ankwe' has been used to refer to the people, especially in older literature and to outsiders. As of 2020, it is estimated that there are around 380,000 Goemai speakers.

Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics</span>

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located in Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands. The institute was founded in 1980 by Pim Levelt, and is unique for being entirely dedicated to psycholinguistics, and is also one of the few institutes of the Max Planck Society to be located outside Germany. The Nijmegen-based institute currently occupies 2nd position in the Ranking Web of World Research Centers among all Max Planck institutes. It currently employs about 235 people.

Martin Haspelmath is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.

Randy John LaPolla is a professor and former Head of Division at the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies in Nanyang Technological University. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, elected 2008. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the Center for Language Sciences at Beijing Normal University's Zhuhai campus, and Associate Fellow of CLASS, Nanyang Technological University.

Hans-Jürgen Sasse was a German linguist.

Peter Kenneth Austin, often cited as Peter K. Austin, is an Australian linguist, widely published in the fields of language documentation, syntax, linguistic typology and in particular, endangered languages and language revitalisation. After a long academic career in Australia, Hong Kong, the US, Japan, Germany and the UK, Austin is emeritus professor at SOAS University of London since retiring in December 2018.

Shobhana Chelliah is an Indian-American linguist who specializes in Sino-Tibetan languages. As of 2023, she is a professor of linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington.  Her research focuses on the documentation of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrej Kibrik</span>

Andrej Kibrik is a Russian linguist, the director of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and professor at the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State University. Member of the Academia Europaea since 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vladimir Plungian</span>

Vladimir Plungian is a Russian linguist, specialist in linguistic typology and theory of grammar, morphology, corpus linguistics, African studies, poetics.

Harald Hammarström is a Swedish linguist. He is currently an Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University. Hammarström is especially known for his extensive work on curating Glottolog, a bibliographic database of the world's languages.

Ulrike Zeshan is a German-born linguist and academic specializing in the linguistics of signed languages. She is Professor of Sign Language Linguistics at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

William Bernard McGregor is an Australian linguist and professor in linguistics at Aarhus University. He specializes in the description of mainly non-Pama-Nyungan Australian languages and does descriptive linguistic work on Gooniyandi, Nyulnyul and Warrwa, but also studies the Shua language in Africa. He works on theoretical and typological issues from within a variation of systemic functional linguistics dubbed Semiotic Grammar developed by himself.

Mira Ariel is a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, specializing in pragmatics. A pioneer of the study of information structure, she is best known for creating and developing Accessibility Theory.

Hilary Chappell is a professor of linguistics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on grammaticalization and the typology of the Sinitic languages.

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm is a Russian-born linguist and typologist who is Professor of General Linguistics at Stockholm University.

Heike Behrens is a German linguist who is professor of cognitive linguistics and language acquisition at the University of Basel.

Brigitte Pakendorf is a South African linguist and geneticist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano is a professor of linguistics at the University of Zaragoza known for her research in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Birgit Hellwig". Academia Europaea. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
  2. 1 2 "Birgit Hellwig". Abralin ao Vivo. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
  3. 1 2 "Birgit Hellwig – Curriculum Vitae". Academia Europaea. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
  4. ↑ "Goemai Texts". Endangered Languages Archive. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
  5. ↑ "Semantic categories: Exploring the history of the Baining languages of Island Melanesia". Research Data Australia. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
  6. ↑ "Professorin Dr. Birgit Hellwig, Ph.D." DFG – GEPRIS. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
  7. ↑ "Prof. Dr. Birgit Hellwig". VolkswagenStiftung. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.